Section I: Decency and Common Goals

The American republic was not born in consensus. It was born in the most ferocious sustained argument in the Western political tradition, conducted by men who had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to a common cause and then proceeded, almost immediately, to disagree about nearly everything that cause meant. Any honest account of the early republic has to begin here. The founders fought each other with an intensity that makes our present quarrels look almost tame, and they did so in the same rooms, on the same letterheads, and at the same dinner tables.

What distinguishes their generation is not the absence of bitterness but the presence of something else alongside it — a disciplined refusal to let private animosity dissolve the public thing they had built. They left us not a model of civility but a model of recovery: how to fight hard, lose ugly, and still hand the republic forward intact. That is the standard worth recovering.

The Bitter Disagreements They Actually Had

The first and most consequential rupture ran straight through George Washington's cabinet. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, and Thomas Jefferson, the first Secretary of State, held visions of the American future so structurally opposed that no compromise between them was possible — only an unstable equilibrium maintained by Washington's personal authority (Chernow, 2004; Ellis, 2002). Hamilton wanted a centralized commercial republic anchored by a national bank, a funded debt, an industrial economy, and a strong executive capable of acting decisively on the world stage. Jefferson wanted a decentralized agrarian federation of yeoman citizens, suspicious of concentrated capital, suspicious of standing armies, and constitutionally allergic to any reading of federal power that exceeded the strictest construction of the enumerated clauses.

They were not arguing about tactics. They were arguing about what kind of country the United States was going to be. By 1793 the cabinet was effectively at war with itself, and Washington — who had hoped to preside above faction — found that even his own government had divided into two organized parties that would, within five years, be calling each other monarchists and Jacobins in the public prints.

The breach between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was even more painful because it began as a friendship. The two had served together in the Continental Congress, collaborated on the Declaration of Independence, and represented the young republic together in Europe. The election of 1800 broke them. Federalist newspapers, taking their cue from the Adams administration, denounced Jefferson as an atheist, a Jacobin, and a coward who would import the bloody chaos of revolutionary France onto American soil. The Republican press, encouraged at arm's length by Jefferson and his lieutenants, savaged Adams as a closet monarchist with the bearing of a tyrant (Ferling, 2004; Larson, 2007). When the votes were counted and Adams had lost, he left Washington City before dawn on inauguration day rather than witness his rival's triumph. The two did not speak for eleven years.

Hamilton's quarrel with Aaron Burr proved literally fatal. After years of political maneuvering in which Hamilton repeatedly worked to deny Burr both the presidency and the New York governorship, Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel on the heights of Weehawken, New Jersey, on the morning of July 11, 1804. Hamilton was mortally wounded and died the following day (Chernow, 2004; Freeman, 2001). A sitting Vice President of the United States had shot dead the architect of the American financial system over a personal slight magnified by partisan politics. Nothing we are presently doing to each other matches that, and we should remember it before we tell ourselves the country has never been worse.

How They Kept the Republic Intact Anyway

What is striking about the founding generation is not that they failed to quarrel, but that, having quarreled, they almost always pulled back from the abyss. Washington's Farewell Address of September 1796 was the first public warning, and it deserves to be quoted in full at least once in any paper of this kind:

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, is itself a frightful despotism.

— George Washington, Farewell Address, September 1796

Washington understood that factions could not be abolished, only contained. He did not pretend to a non-partisan ideal that had never existed; he warned, instead, against the specific failure mode in which one party uses power not to govern but to take revenge on the other, who then takes revenge in turn.

The election of 1800 became the first test of whether the constitutional order could survive an actual transfer of power between rival parties. It did. The Federalists surrendered control of the federal government to the very Democratic-Republicans they had spent four years denouncing as Jacobins. Jefferson used his First Inaugural Address on March 4, 1801, to extend an explicit olive branch:

We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

— Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

The reconciliation of Adams and Jefferson, brokered by Benjamin Rush beginning in 1809, produced one of the great correspondences in American letters — 158 letters between January 1812 and the spring of 1826 (Cappon, 1959). On July 4, 1826 — exactly fifty years after the Declaration they had drafted together — both men died within hours of each other. Adams's last reported words were "Thomas Jefferson survives." In fact Jefferson had died a few hours earlier at Monticello. The historical coincidence is so neat it almost reads as fiction, but it is sober record.

James Madison's Federalist No. 10, written in November 1787, refused the comforting fiction that factions could be wished away. "Liberty is to faction what air is to fire," he wrote, "an aliment without which it instantly expires." Since the only way to abolish faction was to abolish liberty itself, the proper response was to build institutions that channeled factional conflict rather than suppressing it. Federalist No. 51 supplied the operative mechanism: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." The founders did not promise us a country without quarrel. They promised us a machinery for quarreling without killing each other.

What Was Different Then — and What Was Not

Several material conditions made the founders' partisan combat differ from our own. There was no mass media — partisan pamphlets reached tens of thousands of readers, not hundreds of millions through a single viral post. Political conflict happened among an elite class of a few thousand people, almost all of whom knew each other personally and had served together in the Revolution. Adams and Jefferson could not log on at midnight and read what 200 million strangers were saying about them; we can. That difference is real.

But the temptation to read the founding as a lost golden age of civility should be resisted. The founders had a partisan press at least as savage as our own. In 1798 the Adams administration signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, under which Federalist prosecutors jailed Democratic-Republican editors for criticizing the government. The founding generation's institutional framework ultimately failed the most consequential test it faced: the Civil War of 1861–1865, which cost roughly 620,000 American lives and remains the bloodiest single failure of decency across difference in our history. The founders are not a perfect model. They are a useful one — useful precisely because they show what is possible even when the temptations of faction are at their most ferocious.

The decency they modeled was not politeness. It was the discipline of distinguishing the political opponent from the personal enemy, and the further discipline of refusing to weaponize the state against the former even when one was tempted to treat them as the latter. That discipline is what we have lost. The rest of this paper is about how, and what to do about it.